Kent Johnson emailed me the following question, & suggested I post it with my response here. I'm doing so, despite misgivings : I don't like using the word "shit" in public (or private, actually). But according to such august authorities as Yeats & Akhmatova, this is where poems come from. . .

Henry, so all these connections and layers-- layers connecting and connections 
layering... You seem to be able to verify it all and with impressive empirical 
aplomb. 
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Did you plan it all out, or did it just happen? 
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 (A bit of both, I suspect, but could you talk about how all these tropic and 
allegorical interweavings were woofed on the warp and vice versa? You might 
consider this a follow up question to our interview at Jacket.)
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Kent

 
Hi Kent,

 
it's hard to explain, because as you know writing happens in sort of a liminal 
area.

 
I remember a key moment when I was reading the Mandelstam Voronezh poems again, 
about "black earth". I have a feeling for that kind of landscape, coming from 
where I do. Who knows, maybe on a certain freudian level it's all just playing 
with shit (like the kid in the poem I published today, playing with mud between 
her legs)!!

 
But there was a moment when I was identifying with the sound & imagery of that 
rural place which OM was evoking, & I linked it with "letting go", & going into 
the earth, & somehow retrieving all the broken things in my life from the past & 
dealing with them (unrequited love, divorce, Julie's suicide, etc.) - & doing 
this through the Orpheus thing. all that plus actively "mimicking" a certain 
sound I thought I heard in the Voronezh poems.

 
At that moment, when I think of it, I was at a point where all my somewhat 
unsuccessful efforts were behind me, as PRACTICE & preparation, & something new 
was about to unfold.   The best way I can describe it, is that it happened - all 
those layers & connections - the way an algorithm works. A fairly simple 
combination creates a certain energy-stimulus : and that energy AUTOMATICALLY 
starts to spiral & complexify. That's what it felt like to me. Those 3 yrs or 
so writing this poem, I was exploding with connective energy.  It wouldn't let 
me go. I certainly didn't "plan" it all. when I finished Stubborn Grew, I 
thought it was done. Then when I finished Grassblade, I thought it was done. 
But only a few days after finishing each book, the next book would come at me 
like a giant WAVE. I felt a kind of dread when that happened because I knew how 
much time & energy it would involve, totally absorbing. "one thing led to 
another".

stay warm,
Henry